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Edit: Interesting thought. I realized that this post is post # 404. However, if you're reading this, then the page has been found. If not, haha.
So Im feeling the need to rant. Be warned that this rant is induced by me seeing the movie Man of The Year with Robin Williams, who I think is a comedic genius. For those of you who havent seen the movie, I highly recommend it. Its vintage Robin Williams and I believe its him at his best. If only politics were this simple.
There are several things I want to “bitch” about this evening. They may or may not be in a particular order and this post may not be cohesive and organized. If it were, it wouldnt be a rant. Rants, for those who arent familiar, are pieces of writing that contain no cohesion but do tend to make certain points. For those of us in the computer industry who are severly overworked, we might consider starting the rant with this. '
' and ending with ' ' These are tags and its a symbol of geek humor. Geek humor aside, there are several pieces of information that I find rather interesting. Some related to the movie mentioned in the previous paragraph and some that relate to the tech industry. Lets start with tech.MySpace, as regulars (which incidently are the only people probably reading MI Web Forums) are familiar with, is a social networking site that allows you to connect with people from all over the world. Someone named Tom thought it would be a good idea for people to be able to connect with each other. Since the inception of the internet, there have been several attempts to allow people to get in touch with each other. In the IT industry, when we're trying to communicate with a piece of equipment, we commonly use PING. This tells us whether or not a piece of equipment is online or not. TRACEROUTE allows us to trace our steps from one piece of equipment to another. There's email, which allows you to send a letter from one person to another or to a group of people. Instant Messengers allow you to do the same thing as a telephone, except you type in real time instead of waiting for a response through email, as the person is usually online and you can communicate with them at that very second. MySpace, along with other social networking sites, allows you to find people and leave them comments, messages, emails and even instant message them through their very own instant messaging service. And while in theory this is a very good idea, it has been known by those who know me that MySpace has some very serious flaws. I believe the user interface for MySpace needs some serious work. MySpace allows you to customize your profile, allowing custom images in your profile and pretty much customizing your profile so that the vistors experience is a good one. You can add music and video to your profile. Myspace also allows friends of yours to leave you cute little comments. However, in order to build such a profile, you have to know HTML, but not really. You can visit a MySpace profile generator, which is available by doing a google search for MySpace layouts. Many of these sites allow popups to show up on your screen, which, in my opinion is a breeding ground for viruses and malware of all kinds. Since the masses seem to think that MySpace is the greatest thing since sliced cheese, they go to these sites and customize their myspace profiles and infect their machines with all kinds of crap. Then they call people like me who say their computers are all screwed up, but have no idea why. As a user of myspace, I login every couple of days and what do I see? I see messages from Tom talking about spam to users comments, of which cannot be removed and interfere with the user experience by disallowing other comments because of them. I see friend requests from people Ive never met, but want to offer me a free iPod or to show me their webcam. Several months ago, I saw bulletins that appeared to come from me, but were actually posted by some jackass who decided to phish my password and post bulletins from me offering free iPods, among other things. I realize that most of this stems from the fact that MySpace is popular, and anything that is popular in the tech world is a breeding ground for hackers and malware programmers who have nothing better to do than mess with people. It is this same reason that the Microsoft Windows operating system is constantly surrounded by security issues and why users of the Mac OS and Linux hate Windows so much. So the brains behind these popular operations take steps to try to fix the problem, yet new problems arise because now hackers have something new to break. My opinion of these popular things is two fold. One, I believe these hackers and malware writers need real jobs. Anyone who's writing processes which interfere need to find something better to do with their time, like maybe suggesting to the brains of popular operations how to fix the problem. Popular isnt bad, since there's a reason why their popular, but if they're going to continue to let themselves be breeding grounds for hackers and malware programmers, perhaps they need to rethink their strategy a bit. Write something thats secure and solid or get off the market. I dont believe there's a product thats free from this type of abuse. The point being that there's no piece of software out there that isnt subject to being hacked. Anyone who says that Linux or the Mac or any social networking site is better than the other is kidding themselves. The simple fact is that one may offer something thats better than the other, but they also come with their own set of problems. If they're not experiencing one set of problems, that doesnt mean it cant happen. It can happen, and at some point, it will. Anyone who's got an ego about their particular product needs to get off their high horse and shut the hell up. Just because it hasnt happened doesnt mean it wont or cant.
Ive vented about this subject before but I want to reiterate a few points here. Gas prices. Anyone who drives a car or who uses gas for heating has experienced this discussion at one point or another. Go to the gas station and tell me what the price of gas is. If its under $2.20, you're lucky. What happened to the days of cheap gas? Ive heard that we're experiencing a shortage because we're starting to come to the end of our oil supply. Yet, oil companies are experiencing gross increases in profit. Not only that, but the United States is currently in its 4th year of a war that many are finding unnecessary. And our president says that by congress placing a date in which they want the troops home that we're not allowing our troops to have those things that we need in order to win the fight. We're continuing to fight in a country that isnt taking responsibility for running and maintaining itself. So we get to spend our hard earned money on it. We're fighting a battle that has nothing to do with us, except that our president believes that this war is being fought as a global war on terrorism. Yet we still cant find bin Laden? What the hell? I heard on the radio the other day as a joke that if they wanted to find bin Laden, they'd have the mob send someone over to the middle east and bin Laden would be taken care of in 24 hours. We've all seen mob movies and this always seems to be the case. Whats the point of us being in Iraq these days? To spend more money to solve a problem that isnt ours? Oh, and Congress is gloating over the wonderful job they've done in passing legislation mandating that the troops be home by a certain time? This is misinformation. Anyone who's familiar with the process will know that the House has done nothing. When legislation is brought up, it is introduced in the House, read twice, then voted on. If it passes a vote in the House, it moves to the Senate, where's its read, then voted on. If it passes the Senate, it then goes to the President. If the president vetos, then it goes back to congress, where they can overturn his veto by a 2/3 majority. The mandate made by Congress has passed the house, by an extremely narrow margin. It hasnt even gone to the senate yet. Congress has done nothing, yet they've reported it as news. And our president is in a huff about it. Tell me something when the damn bill has actually been signed into law and not ready to move through the process. I dont give a crap about the process. As an American who disapproves of the war, I want results, not process. Government process is bull at the very best anyway. How does this affect gas? Well, rather than focusing on the problems we're having in America, our government, in its infinite wisdom, decides to focus on the rest of the world, rather than our problems here. And their not the only one. Angelina Jolie's on another adoption spree, going to Vietnam to adopt. Is America really that undesirable that not even Americans want to fix America? This country needs some serious work. I think we need a politician like Robin Williams character in Man of the Year, who doesnt give a crap about politics but is genuinely interested in America. I guess one could hope.
Thats all I got so far. For now
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